The ascent to paramountcy

At that point a radical change occurred in British policy. Two causes were principally responsible. There was a growing body of opinion within the company that only British control of India could end the constant wars and provide really satisfactory conditions for trade; full dominion would be economical as well as salutary. The more-compelling immediate cause was the transformation of European politics by the French Revolution. A new French threat to India emerged, this time overland, with Napoleon I’s Egyptian expedition of 1798–99. It was certain that a French army under such a leader would find many friends in India to welcome it, not least Tippu Sultan.

The next governor-general, Lord Mornington (later Richard Colley Wellesley, Marquess Wellesley), combined the convictions of the imperialist group with a mandate to deal with the French. Wellesley was thus able to use this fear of the French as a cover for his imperialism until he was near to complete success. His term of office (1798–1805) was therefore a decisive period in the rise of the British dominion.

Wellesley decided first to strike at Mysore, still a formidable military power and avowedly hostile. He had little difficulty getting the nizam for an ally and securing the neutrality of the peshwa. The nizam, hard pressed by the Marathas, was persuaded to disband his contingent of French-trained troops in return for a promise of protection. This was the first of Wellesley’s subsidiary treaties. Tippu Sultan had entertained French republican envoys and had planted a tree of liberty at Seringapatam, but when the British stormed Seringapatam in May 1799 he was isolated and at bay, and he found too late that concessions, in the Indian tradition, would not save him. Tippu Sultan died fighting in the breach. Wellesley tempered his imperialism with diplomacy by restoring the child head of the old Hindu reigning family as the ruler of half of Tippu Sultan’s dominions; the other half was divided between the nizam and the company. This substantially enlarged the area of the Madras presidency.

For the next three years Wellesley was occupied with certain exercises in realpolitik and with developing his device of the subsidiary treaty. The realpolitik was evidenced in four directions. On the death (1801) of the reigning Carnatic nawab, Wellesley took over his territories, pensioning the new nawab with one-fifth of the revenue. The same fate befell the small but highly cultivated state of Tanjore (1799) and the port city of Surat on a disputed succession.

The biggest of these exercises concerned the Mughal successor state of Avadh in northern India, which had been in treaty relationship with the company since 1765. This rich state had fallen into disorder under the listless though cultured rule of Āṣaf al-Dawlah; on his death in 1797 a succession dispute and an Afghan invasion of the Punjab gave Wellesley a welcome opportunity for interference. He pressed the nawab to disband his troops and increase his payment to the company for his subsidiary force. When the nawab made an offer to abdicate, it was accepted immediately; but, on finding that abdication would mean annexation and not his son’s succession, he withdrew it, and Wellesley treated him as rebellious. In 1801 Wellesley annexed half the state, including the Ganges–Yamuna Doab and almost all of Rohilkhand. Whatever the verdict on the means employed, this move had important consequences. Avadh was isolated, and a jumping-off place was secured for an attack on the northern Marathas. The company was no longer looking for buffer states as shields against attack but for territory that would serve as springboards for offensive action.

This change of attitude applies to Wellesley’s development of the subsidiary system. In the hands of Clive and Hastings, it was a defensive instrument to safeguard the company’s possessions; in the hands of Wellesley, it became an offensive device with which to subject independent states to British control. The essence of the system was that the company undertook to protect a state from external attack in return for control of its foreign relations. For this purpose it provided a subsidiary force of company troops, who were commonly stationed in a cantonment near the state capital. The state paid for this force by means of a subsidy, which was often commuted into ceding territory. In order to protect itself from an external enemy, the state in question bound itself irrevocably to the British power, providing at the heart, as it were, the means of its own coercion should it ever wish to resume independence.

Wellesley first applied this system in 1798 to Hyderabad, when the aging Niẓām ʿAlī Khan was in dire fear of the Marathas. In 1800 the subsidy was compounded for the nizam’s share of the Mysore annexations. The same system was applied to Avadh, when the great annexation of 1801 was said to be on account of the subsidiary force. It was then the turn of the Marathas—one of the few remaining bastions of Indian independence. Had the Maratha chiefs remained united, Wellesley could have accomplished little; the death of the young peshwa released fresh dissensions, however, heightened by the death of the minister Nana Fadnavis in 1800. The chiefs Holkar and Dawlat Rao Sindhia contended for power over the peshwa, Baj Rao II. On Holkar’s success in 1802, Baji Rao fled to Bassein and applied for British aid. Such an opportunity at the centre of Maratha power was not to be missed; there was also the justification that Dawlat Rao Sindhia, in the north, had 40,000 French-trained troops under a French commander. The Treaty of Bassein (Dec. 31, 1802) placed, as it were, a time bomb at the heart of the Maratha confederacy; British troops were stationed at Pune, at the price of a cession of territory, and the peshwa was reduced to dependency on the British. (SeeSindhia family; Holkar dynasty.)

This action provoked the Second Maratha War—at first against Dawlat Rao Sindhia and Raghuji Bhonsle and then against Holkar. At first the British won resounding victories. Wellesley’s brother Arthur (later Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of Wellington) defeated the Sindhia-Bhonsle coalition in west-central India, while Lord Lake (Gerard Lake, 1st Viscount Lake) broke up Sindhia’s French army, occupied Delhi, and took the aged emperor Shah ʿĀlam II under protection. Then came a check, however, with the intervention of Holkar using the old Maratha cavalry tactics, forcing the British to retreat, and besieging Delhi. Though Holkar was later defeated, this was the signal for which exasperated directors and a doubting ministry had been waiting. Wellesley was recalled. His race for hegemony had been lost in the last lap. But Wellesley’s work, avowedly imperialistic, made ultimate supremacy inevitable. The Marathas were too broken to reunite, and there was no one to take their place. (SeeTreaty of Surji-Arjungaon.)

The government of Lord Minto

The next 10 years were an interlude, not a new era. During that period both Sindhia and Holkar plundered the chiefs of Rajasthan, thus preparing them mentally for future British overlordship. Meanwhile, bands of freebooters known as Pindaris raided the Nagpur (home of the Bhonsle dynasty) and Hyderabad states in widening circles and thence entered British territory. These were dispossessed villagers and discarded soldiers—the human flotsam and jetsam of the frequent wars. They had the elusiveness of guerrillas, and they received the tacit countenance of the Maratha princes but not the goodwill of the population, who were their principal victims.

Lord Minto (governor-general 1807–13) was occupied with the revived French danger, which was once again serious with the Treaty of Tilsit (1807) and Napoleon I’s resulting alliance with Russia. To guard against a French-sponsored Russian attack, British missions were sent to Afghanistan, to Persia, and to Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of the Punjab. The first two proved fruitless, but the Treaty of Amritsar (1809) with Ranjit Singh defined British and Sikh spheres of influence and settled relations for a generation. Minto’s other achievement was the capture of the Île de France (Mauritius) and Java from the French-controlled Dutch; the former island became a colony, and the latter was restored to the Dutch under the peace treaty. One result of this episode was the acquisition of the key point of Singapore by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819.

1st earl of Minto, detail of an oil painting by James Atkinson.Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 opened a new era in India by strengthening the commercial and economic arguments for completing supremacy and by removing all fear of the French. The Pindari raids, which grew year by year until they affected both the Bengal and Madras presidencies, added further reasons for action. The final act was directed by Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st marquess of Hastings (governor-general 1813–23), who came to India as a consolation for his failure to attain the premiership under his friend the prince regent (later King George IV). Lord Hastings, however, first had to deal in 1814–16 with the Gurkhas of the northern kingdom of Nepal, who inflicted a series of defeats on a Bengal army unprepared for mountain warfare. Each side earned the respect of the other. The resulting Treaty of Segauli (1816) gave the British the tract of hill country where Shimla (Simla), the site of the future summer capital of British India, was situated, and it settled relations between Nepal and British India for the rest of the British period. Nepal remained independent and isolated, supported by the export of soldiers to strengthen the British military presence in India.

Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st marquess of Hastings, detail of a portrait by an unknown artist.Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London

Lord Hastings then turned to the Pindaris. By a large-scale and well-planned enveloping movement, he hoped to enclose them in an iron net. But this involved entering Maratha territories and seeking the cooperation of their princes. Sindhia agreed after agonizing indecision, and this really settled the issue. Holkar’s state was in disorder and was easily defeated. Both the raja of Nagpur and the peshwa resisted and attacked the British forces stationed under their respective subsidiary treaties. Nagpur quickly collapsed, but the peshwa kept up a running fight before surrendering in June 1818. The Pindari bands themselves, chased hither and thither, broke up or surrendered.

The East India Company was thus the undisputed master of India, as far as the Sutlej River in the Punjab. This episode was completed by the acceptance of British suzerainty by the Rajput chiefs of Rajasthan, central India, and Kathiawar, as they had formerly accepted the Mughals. Thus the year 1818 marks a watershed, when the British Empire in India became the British Empire of India.

The settlement of 1818

The diplomatic settlement of 1818, except for a few annexations before 1857, remained in force until 1947 and is therefore worth some attention. The company, under the influence of its guiding star of economy, wished to be saved as much of the expense of administering India as possible, especially the less fertile portions. Having controlled the larger states by its subsidiary forces (for which they paid), it was content with tribute from the remainder, with control posts at strategic points. Thus, Kathiawar was controlled from Baroda and Rajasthan from Ajmer. There was no thought of integration as in Mughal days. The states were isolated and excluded from any connection with the British. About half of India remained under Indian rulers, robbed of any power of aggression and deprived of any opportunity of cooperation: in the south were the large units of Mysore, Hyderabad, and Travancore; in the west, the states of Shivaji’s family; across the centre to the east, Nagpur and a number of poor “jungle” states; in the west and west-central areas, numerous Rajput and other Hindu chiefs with the surviving Maratha states of Sindhia, Holkar, and the Gaekwar; west of the Yamuna River, some Sikh princedoms; and in the Ganges valley, the still prosperous and disorderly state of Avadh. In all there were more than 360 units; politically, they were like the surviving fragments of a broken jigsaw puzzle, with all its complexity but without its unity.

The subjection of a whole subcontinent containing a unique civilization has long been a source of historical wonderment. The one-time explanations of innate superiority and of mere fate are no longer seriously entertained. But analysis goes far to dissipate the mystery. In the first place, the feat was not unique; the Turkish Muslims had twice done much the same—for shorter periods, it is true, but also with fewer resources. All these achievements were made possible by the innate divisiveness of Hindu society, rent by class and caste divisions, which rendered it unusually willing to call in unwelcome outsiders to defeat the still more unwelcome neighbour. The foreigners, asked in the first resort to assist in defeating a rival, were in the last resort accepted as masters in preference to dominance by a rival. Thus, Marathas preferred the British to the Mughals, and the nizam preferred the British to the Marathas. Long historical memories can be inhibiting as well as inspiring. Against this setting can be set the company’s urge toward unity in the interests of trade. Even when its Indian trade was no longer profitable, India gave profits to others, and its opium bought the Chinese tea, which gave the East India Company its overall profits. Given the fact of expansion, Britain enjoyed the advantage of overseas reinforcement through its sea power and of reserves of power, far greater than that of any Indian prince, through its rapidly expanding industrial economy. A lost battle for the British was an incident in a campaign, for the Indian prince usually the end of the chapter. Then there were the technical advantages of arms and military discipline and the immense general advantage of a disciplined civilian morale. In the later stages this was boosted by the rising self-confidence of Europeans in general, with their belief that the western European civilization was the only truly progressive one that had ever existed. For the Hindu, on the other hand, his world was at its lowest ebb—in the Kali Yuga, or Dark Age—while the Muslim believed in inscrutable fate. The Hindu’s heart was in his religio-cultural complex, and political dominion meant little to the ordinary Hindu so long as this remained untouched.

Organization and policy in British India

The realization of supremacy in 1818 made urgent the problem of the organization of and determination of policy for British India. So far only Bengal had been deliberately organized; the extensive areas annexed after 1799 in the north and the south were still under provisional arrangements. Now the peshwa’s dominions in the west awaited settlement. The administrators of the first 30 years of the 19th century gave British India the form it retained until 1947. Outstanding among them were Sir Thomas Munro in Madras, Mountstuart Elphinstone in western India, and Sir Charles T. Metcalfe in Delhi; to this trio must be added a fourth—Holt MacKenzie, whose planning determined the lines of settlement from Banaras (Varanasi) to the Yamuna River.

Organization

The only areas so far definitely settled were those of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. Lord Cornwallis had been charged by Pitt with the reorganization of Bengal under the new act. Besides being a soldier of distinction, Cornwallis was a man of outstanding integrity, a landlord with rural tastes, and an instinctive Whig. Cornwallis first undertook a cleansing of the existing system. Discipline among the company’s servants was enforced at the price of dismissal. Private trade was forbidden to all government officers, and the service was divided into administrative and commercial branches. These measures (which, with others, became known as the Cornwallis Code) were coupled with a generous salary system, which removed the temptation to corruption. From this time the company’s service began to gain its later reputation for efficiency and integrity. All this could be done because the governor-general, with his council of three and his veto power, was now unassailable to the attacks that had ruined Vansittart and frustrated Warren Hastings.

Lord Cornwallis, undated engraving.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

From this base Cornwallis built up the Bengal system. Its first principle was Anglicization. In the belief that Indian officials were corrupt (and that British corruption had been cured), all posts worth more than £500 a year were reserved for the company’s covenanted servants. Next came the government. The 23 districts each had a British collector with magisterial powers and two assistants, who were responsible for revenue collection. The judicial system was organized with district judges for both civil and criminal cases. In civil cases there were four courts of appeal; and in criminal, four circuit courts. Criminal justice was taken over from the nawab’s deputy, thus removing the last shred of Mughal authority. The criminal code was the Islamic one, humanely modified. A new police force replaced the former local constables of the zamindars. This new system, which, with its division of authority, showed its Whig influence, was rounded off by the proclamation of the rule of law, making all governmental acts answerable in the ordinary courts of law. Though hardly noticed at the time by Indians, it was a radical innovation with far-reaching effects. It was a charter of civil—as distinct from political—liberty.

Cornwallis’s permanent settlement of the land revenue is the measure that most deeply affected the life and structure of Indian society, three-quarters of the revenue coming from the land. He found a system of hereditary zamindars, who had acquired police and magisterial powers as well and who were much shaken by the frequent changes of revenue policy under the British. The “settlement” was the decision in 1793 to stabilize the revenue demand at a fixed annual figure, with a commission to the zamindar for collection, and to regard him as the owner of his zamindari; he had the disposal of wastelands within his jurisdiction, but these lands were liable to be sold for arrears of payment. Thus, the land revenue collector became a landlord, with the Achilles’ heel that the lands he administered could be sold for arrears, while the tiers of lesser landholders became his tenants. The zamindar reaped the profit of rising prices and of cultivation of wasteland, while the classes below him lost their occupancy rights. The intended protection of these tenants proved illusory because their rights were customary, unsupported by documents. The legal cases that ensued clogged the courts to the point of breakdown. Initially, the zamindar often lost his holding because the fixed demand was pitched too high. The net result of this measure was the creation of a landlord class, loyal to the British connection but divorced from touch with the cultivators. The government, receiving the revenue from the zamindars, knew little of the people and could do little for them.

At first the Bengal system was thought to provide the key to Indian administration, but doubts multiplied with the years. In Madras, Sir Thomas Munro retained the paternal framework of government but introduced a radically differing method of revenue management known as the ryotwari system, in which the settlement was made directly with the cultivator, each field being separately measured and annually assessed. The system eliminated the middleman but sometimes placed the cultivators at the mercy of lower officials, who often formed cliques of caste groups. Munro considered that innovation and ignorance were the ruling British vices. His system tended to be static and to allow the subordinate tail to wag the directing British dog.

In western India, Mountstuart Elphinstone had the problem of reconciling to British control the resentful Marathas of the peshwa’s dominions. With a masterly mixture of tact and firmness, he largely succeeded. He retained Indian agency as far as possible, and he allowed the Maratha nobles, or jāgīrdārs, to retain most of their land and many of their privileges. He even continued some donations to Hindu temples. He used the ryotwari method of assessing land revenue, collecting through local officials from the village headmen. In Bombay he encouraged Western learning and science, tempting suspicious Brahmans to open their minds to the West. He foresaw the ultimate end of British rule through voluntary Westernization, and he took the first steps toward introducing the new world without antagonizing the old.

In the north, Sir Charles Metcalfe discovered the largely autonomousvillage with its joint ownership and cultivation by caste oligarchies. He believed this to be the original pattern of rural organization throughout India, and it became his passion to preserve it as far as possible in current conditions. Like Munro and Elphinstone, he was suspicious of change and wished to leave the villagers alone as far as possible. In this he was powerfully supported by the work of Holt MacKenzie, the Bengal secretary whose memorandum of 1819 set a course of recognition and record of village rights for the whole of the northwestern provinces (as later revised and codified, this marked the end of the Bengal system of permanent revenue settlement).

The resulting system of administration of British India was still largely Indian in pattern, though it was now British in direction and superintendence. It was paternalistic and hierarchical, and it suffered, like its immediate predecessors, from a chronic tendency to overassess. The Mughal emperor was replaced by the mystical entity the Company Bahadur, and its representative, the governor-general, moved about with almost equal pomp. The higher direction was exclusively European, but the officers acted in a Mughal spirit, and the administration at subdistrict and village level went on much as before. But there were also large changes. The British established on a national scale the idea of property in land, and the resulting buying and selling caused large class changes. Their new security benefited the commercial classes generally, but the deliberate sacrifice of Indian industry to the claims of the new machine industries of Britain ruined such ancient crafts as cotton and silk weaving. The new legal system, with its network of courts, proved efficient on the criminal justice side but was heavily overloaded on the civil.

The strain and the scandal of this situation created a demand for increased Indian agency and caused the first breaches in the British monopoly of higher office. Indianization began with the confessed inefficiency of the British legal system. The picture is completed by the company’s army, separately organized in the three presidencies and officered, like the civil service, exclusively by the British. It was backed by contingents of the British army. The Bengal army preponderated in numbers and fighting spirit. By European standards it was cumbrous and inefficient; some of its defects were exposed in the early days of the war with Nepal. But it was more than a match for anything that could be brought against it. Of other powers in the region, only the Russians, could they have moved so far in force, might have made short work of it.

The determination of policy

The administration of British India thus established was impressive though ponderous. But it was essentially static; it was a repair of the machinery of government without any decision about its direction. Such a situation in a subcontinent could not be viable for long.

In the early 19th century a great debate went on in Britain about the nature of the government in India. The company wanted India to be regarded as a field for British commercial exploitation, with the company holding the administrative whip with one hand and exploiting with the other. This pleased no one but the company itself. As an extension of this, the new regime could be regarded as a law-and-order or police state, holding the ring while British merchants in general traded profitably. But this was assailed from several quarters. There was the Whig demand, first voiced by Edmund Burke in his campaign against Warren Hastings, that the Indian government must be responsible for the welfare of the governed. This was reinforced by Evangelicals in England, both Anglican and Baptist, who added the rider that, as the ruler, Britain was responsible for India’s spiritual and moral welfare as well. The Evangelicals were a rising force, influential in the British “establishment.” Their remedy for India, as a preparation for conversion, was English education. They were reinforced in this by the rising group of freethinking utilitarians—followers of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill—who were influential in the company’s service, who wished to use India as a laboratory for their theories, and who thought Indian society could be transformed by legislation. Finally, there were radical rationalists who had borrowed the doctrine of human rights from France and wished to introduce them into India, and on the practical side there was a body of British merchants and manufacturers who saw in India both a market and a profitable theatre of activity and who chafed at the restraints of the East India Company’s monopoly.

Some of these influences seeped into the Tory ascendancy, which lasted until 1830. In 1813 the East India Company lost its monopoly of trade with India and was compelled to allow free entry of missionaries. British India was declared to be British territory, and money was to be set aside annually for the promotion of both Eastern and Western learning. But the real breakthrough came with the governor-generalship of Lord William Bentinck (served 1828–35) and with the Whig government that from 1830 carried the great Reform Bill.

Bentinck was a radical aristocrat. His administrative reforms were in line with utilitarian theory but with deference to local conditions and in harmony with his own military sense of command. In Bengal the collector was made the real head of his district by the addition of civil judgeship to his magistracy; he was also disciplined by the institution of commissioners to superintend him. The judiciary was overhauled with the same eye to a chain of authority.

But it was as a social reformer that Bentinck made an indelible mark on the future of India. He was commissioned by the directors to effect economies in order to show a balanced budget in the approaching charter-renewal discussions. In doing this he incurred much odium, but he was able to take the first steps in Indianizing the higher judicial services. On his arrival Bentinck was confronted with an agitation against suttee, the burning of Hindu widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. In suppressing the practice, he had to face the reproaches of both Hindus and Europeans on the grounds of religious interference. But he was also fortified by the support of the Hindu reformer Ram Mohun Roy. In thus acting and in prohibiting child sacrifice on Sagar Island and discouraging infanticide—a widespread practice among the Rajputs—Bentinck established the principle that the general good did not permit violations of the universal moral law, even if done in the name of religion. The same principle applied to the suppression of ritual murder and robbery by gangs of thagi (thugs) in central India in the name of the goddess Kali.

Bentinck also substituted English for Persian as the language of record for government and the higher courts, and he declared that government support would be given primarily to the cultivation of Western learning and science through the medium of English. In this he was supported by Thomas Babington (later Lord) Macaulay.

This period saw the British in India committed to promoting the positive welfare of India instead of merely holding a ring for trade and exploitation; to introducing Western knowledge, science, and ideas alongside the Indian with a view to eventual absorption and adoption; and to the promotion of Indian participation in the government with a view to eventual Indian self-government. It was the changeover from the concept of a Mughal successor state—the Company Bahadur—to that of a Westernized self-governing dominion. In the former case, the British were wardens of a stationary society; in the latter, trustees of an evolving one.

A word should be added about the Indian states. Their place in British India was also a subject of the great debate on the future of India. On the whole, the argument for subordinate isolation held, and no great change occurred in their status until after the revolt of 1857 (see belowThe mutiny and great revolt of 1857–59). Out of the discussions, however, came the de facto principle of British paramountcy, which was increasingly assumed though not openly proclaimed. The only important change before 1840 was the takeover of Mysore in 1831 on the ground of misgovernment; it was not annexed, but it was administered on behalf of the raja for the next 50 years.

The completion of dominion and expansion

After the settlement of 1818, the only parts of India beyond British control were a fringe of Himalayan states to the north, the valley and hill tracts of Assam to the east, and a block of territory in the northwest covering the Indus valley, the Punjab, and Kashmir. To the south Ceylon was already occupied by the British, but to the east the Buddhist kingdom of Myanmar (Burma) straddled the Irrawaddy River.

The Himalayan states were Nepal of the Gurkhas, Bhutan, and Sikkim. Nepal and Bhutan remained nominally independent throughout the British period, though both eventually became British protectorates—Nepal in 1815 and Bhutan in 1866. Sikkim came under British protection in 1890; earlier it had ceded the hill station of Darjiling (Darjeeling) to the British. The valley and hill tracts of Assam were taken under protection to save them from attack by Burmans from Myanmar. Beginning in 1836, the Indian tea plant was cultivated, after the failure of Chinese imported ones, and thus commenced the great Indian tea industry.

In the early 19th century the Burmans were in an aggressive mood, having defeated the Thais (1768) and subjected Arakan and hill states on either side of the river valleys. Attacks on British protected territory in 1824 started the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26), which, though mismanaged, led to the British annexation of the coastal strips of Arakan and Tenasserim in 1826. The Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852) was caused by disputes between merchants (trading in rice and teak timber) and the Rangoon governor. The governor-general, Lord Dalhousie (served 1848–56), intervened, annexing the maritime province of Pegu with the port of Rangoon (now Yangôn) in a campaign—this time well-managed and economical. Commercial imperialism was the motive for this campaign.

To the northwest, British India was bounded by the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh, who added the Vale of Kashmir and Peshawar to his state in 1819. Beyond was confusion, with the Afghan monarchy in dissolution and its lands parcelled between several chiefs and Sind (Sindh), controlled by a group of emirs, or chiefs. British indifference changed to action in the 1830s, owing to the advance of Russia in Central Asia and to that nation’s diplomatic duel with Lord Palmerston about its influence in Turkey. Afghanistan was seen as a point from which Russia could threaten British India or Britain could embarrass Russia. Lord Auckland (served 1836–42) was sent as governor-general, charged with forestalling the Russians, and from this stemmed his Afghan adventure and the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–42). The method adopted was to restore Shah Shojāʿ, the exiled Afghan king, then living in the Punjab, by ousting the ruler of Kabul, Dūst Muḥammad. Ranjit Singh cooperated in the enterprise but cleverly avoided any military commitment, leaving the British to bear the whole burden. The route of invasion lay through Sind, because of Sikh occupation of the Punjab.

The emirs’ treaty of 1832 with the British was brushed aside, and Sind was forced to pay arrears of tribute to Shah Shojāʿ. At first things went well, with victories and the occupation of Kabul in 1839. But then it was discovered that Shah Shojāʿ was too unpopular to rule the country unaided; the British restoring force thus became a foreign occupying army—anathema to the liberty-loving Afghans—and was regularly engaged in putting down sporadic tribal revolts. After two years a general revolt in the autumn of 1841 overwhelmed and virtually annihilated the retreating British garrison. Meanwhile, the Russian menace in eastern Europe had receded. Auckland’s successor, Lord Ellenborough (served 1842–44), arranged for a brief reoccupation and sack of Kabul by means of a converging march from Kandahār in the south and Jalālābād in the east and a return through the Khyber Pass. Thus, honour was satisfied, and the fact of defeat was glossed over. Shah Shojāʿ was shortly thereafter murdered. The episode demonstrated, at a heavy price in terms of money and human suffering, both the ease with which Afghanistan could be overrun by a regular army and the difficulty of holding it. The enterprise, though conceived as an insurance against Russian imperialism, developed into a species of imperialism itself. Economics joined with Afghan spirit to put a limit on British expansion in this direction. (SeeAnglo-Afghan Wars).

After the Afghans came Sind. There was little to be said for the emirs themselves—a group of related chiefs who had come to power in the late 18th century and had kept the country in poverty and stagnation. A treaty in 1832 threw the Indus River open to commerce except for the passage of armed vessels or military stores; at the same time, the integrity of Sind was recognized. Thus, Auckland’s march through Sind was a clear violation of a treaty signed only seven years before. Sore feelings at the turn of events in Afghanistan produced a final breach. On a charge of unfriendly feelings by the emirs during the First Anglo-Afghan War, Karachi, occupied in 1839, was retained. Further demands were then made; the moderate resident James Outram was superseded by the militant general Sir Charles James Napier; and resistance was provoked, to be crushed at the Battle of Miani (1843). Sind was then annexed to the Bombay Presidency; after four years of rough-and-ready rule by Napier, its economy was put in order by Sir Bartle Frere.

There remained the great Sikh state of the Punjab, the single-handed creation of Ranjit Singh. Succeeding to a local chiefship in 1792 at the age of 12, he occupied Lahore in 1799 under a grant from Zamān Shah, the Afghan king. He could thus pose as a legitimate ruler, not only to his own people (the Sikhs) but to the majority of Muslims of the Punjab. From this start he extended his dominions northwestward as far as the Afghan hills and including the Kashmir region and southwestward well beyond Multan, toward the Sindh region. The Treaty of Amritsar with the British in 1809 barred his expansion southeastward; besides directing Ranjit’s expansionism northwestward, it produced an admiration for the disciplined company’s troops, who coolly repelled the Sikh Akali suicide squads when they attacked the British at Amritsar. From that time dates the formation of the formidable Sikh army with its 40,000 disciplined infantry, 12,000 cavalry, and powerful artillery—as well as large numbers of foreign mercenary officers. It was generally agreed that the Sikh army compared favourably for efficiency with the company’s forces.

Ranjit Singh employed Hindus and Muslims besides Sikhs, but his regime was in fact a Sikh dominion based on tacit Hindu support and Muslim acquiescence. It used most of the revenue to support the army, which made it apparently powerful but retarded development. It was a highly personal system, centred on Ranjit himself. It was thus one that the company would not lightly attack but that had inner weaknesses behind its formidable facade. These weaknesses began to be exposed on the morrow of Ranjit’s death in 1839; within six years the state was on the verge of dissolution. Army disbandment or foreign adventure seemed the only way for the Sikhs to deal with this crisis. The former being impossible, at length the Rani Jindan, regent for the boy prince Dalip Singh, the chief minister, and the commander in chief agreed on a move against the British. The frontier was crossed in December 1845, and a sharp and bloody war ended in a British victory at the Battle of Sobraon in February 1846. The British feared to annex outright a region full of former soldiers and wished to retain a buffer state against possible attack from the northwest. By the Treaty of Lahore they took Kashmir and its dependencies, with the fertile Jullundur (now Jalandhar) area, reduced the regular army to 20,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, and exacted a sizable cash indemnity. The British then sold Kashmir to the Hindu chief Gulab Singh of Jammu, who had changed sides at precisely the right moment. Thus were sown the seeds of a chronic political problem for the subcontinent. (SeeBattle of Fīrōz Shah; Sikh Wars.)

Sikh nobles chafed under the conditions of the peace, and two years later a rising at Multan became a national Sikh revolt; the Sikh court was helpless. Another brief and still bloodier war, with the Sikhs this time fighting resolutely, ended with their surrender in March 1849 and the British annexation of the state.

Annexation this time proved viable, perhaps because of the underlying tension between Sikhs and Muslims. The Sikhs may have preferred the British to a Muslim raj. The British repressed the sirdars, or Sikh leaders, but left the rest of the community and its religion untouched.

Whatever the reason, the Sikhs sided with the British during the 1857 mutiny; the Muslims, however, could not forget their loss of power to the Sikhs. There was little commercial exploitation of the state, and the Sikhs found employment in the army. Lord Dalhousie closely supervised the administration through a like-minded agent, Sir John Lawrence. The pair produced a new model administration, establishing what was known as the Punjab school. It was noted for strong personal leadership, on-the-spot decisions, strong-arm methods, impartiality between the communities, and material development, including irrigation. A canal, a road, or a bridge was the Punjabi official’s delight. The cultivator was preferred to the sirdar; the countryman was preferred to the townsman. The Punjab system was strong and efficient, creating prosperity, but it never reconciled the two main confessional communities or welded them into unity.

Lord Dalhousie’s reign is often regarded as an exercise in imperialism; in fact it was more an exercise in Westernism. Dalhousie was a man of great drive and strong conviction. In general, he considered Western civilization to be far superior to that of the Indian, and the more of it that could be introduced, the better. Along these lines he pushed Western education—introducing a grant-in-aid system, which later proliferated Indian private colleges—and planned three universities. Socially, he allowed Christian converts to inherit the property of their Hindu families. Materially, he extended irrigation and the telegraph and introduced the railway.

James Ramsey, 10th earl of Dalhousie, detail of an oil painting by Sir John Watson-Gordon, 1847.Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London

Politically, British administration was preferable to Indian, and it was to be imposed where possible. Externally, this led to annexation, as in the Punjab and in Myanmar, rather than to the control of foreign relations or to a British-superintended native regime. Internally, it led to the annexation of Indian states on the ground of misgovernment or the doctrine of lapse. The leading case of misgovernment was the disorderly but prosperous Muslim state of Avadh—one of the oldest allies of the British. The doctrine of lapse concerned Hindu states where rulers had no direct natural heirs. Hindu law allowed adoption to meet these cases, but Dalhousie declared that such must be approved by the supreme government; otherwise there was “lapse” to the paramount power, which meant the imposition of the usual British administration. The three principal cases were Satara in 1848 (the descendants of the Maratha king Shivaji), Jhansi (1853), and the large Maratha state of Nagpur (1854). Finally, Dalhousie abolished the titular sovereignties of the Carnatic and Tanjore and declined to continue the former peshwa’s pension to his adopted son.

The first century of British influence

The onset of British influence in India differed both in manner and in kind from that of other historical invasions. The British came neither as migrating hordes seeking new homes nor, originally, as armies seeking plunder or empire. They had no missionary zeal. Yet eventually they did more to transform India than did any previous ruling power. This apparent paradox requires some explanation.

Political effects

At first the British were only one group of foreign traders among several, fortunate to find in the Mughals a firm government ready to foster trade. Their entry into politics was gradual, first as allies of country powers, then as their virtual directors, and only finally as masters. At each step they were assisted by local powers who preferred British influence to that of their neighbours. It was mainly in the 20 years from 1798 to 1818 that they were consciously imperialistic and only thereafter that they treated India as a conquered rather than an acquired country. The effect of this was to replace the defunct Mughal regime and the abortive Maratha successor empire with a veiled but very real hegemony.

Indians were accustomed to the idea of political unity and overlordship. They admired the British for being more successful than themselves, while reprobating many of the British habits and doctrines. But the old ruling classes showed little sign of adopting British institutions; after 1818 they withdrew within themselves, nursing their memories rather than feeding their hopes. The Indian regimes of 1857 all assumed a traditional form. The one department in which Western influence was effective was the military. From the time of Mir Qasim in Bengal (1760–63), Indian princes began to train troops in the European manner and to form parks of artillery. Some of these bodies, culminating in Ranjit Singh’s Sikh army, attained a high degree of efficiency. Their problem was maintenance, for most princes lacked the necessary resources to pay their men and officers regularly and maintain their arms. Indian opinion, in general, saw the British as the latest holders of the traditional paramount power. There was no novelty in the fact that there were foreign personnel within the government, for this had been a Mughal practice too. What was new was the artificial division between British India and Indian-governed India, with little contact between the two. The Mughals had practiced partnership for a century; the Turks and Afghans, subordinate cooperation; but the British, it seemed, wished to forget the Indian leaders altogether.

Economic effects

Things were quite different in the economic field. Up to 1750 the effect of the East India Company’s operations was marginal. Production of cotton and silk goods, indigo, saltpetre, and, later, opium was stimulated in particular areas such as Bengal, Gujarat, and Malwa, with some gain to the middlemen but no sign of any general rise in living standards. India was then, as now, mainly agricultural, and its industries, though significant, were marginal to its whole economy. The latter changed, however, with the acquisition of Bengal. The bias in favour of British merchants diverted trade from their Indian counterparts, though some of the profit went back to the British merchants’ Indian agents. The extravagant present giving, a large abuse of a traditional system, diverted much money to Britain. Still more, the pressure on the zamindars for more revenue, and theirs in turn on the cultivators, further diminished the Bengali income. To this must be added the operation of monopolies, public and private. When the Bengal famine of 1770 occurred, a famine reckoned to have swept away one-third of the population, little attempt at relief was made, though it would have been practicable given Bengal’s network of waterways. The cruel severity with which the revenue was still collected at this time delayed recovery for many years. Economic recovery was further delayed by Warren Hastings’s makeshift revenue arrangements; and much dislocation was caused in the social structure, with its own effect on economic life.

Cornwallis’s permanent settlement (1793), after an initial period of dislocation, gave relief and security to the zamindars, who benefited by the rise in prices and the cultivation of wastelands; the cultivators themselves, now the zamindars’ tenants-at-will, remained as poor as before. Apart from the zamindars, the principal class to benefit from the British was that of the entrepreneurs of Calcutta, who acted as agents and bankers to the British. Thus, both Clive’s and Hastings’s business managers became wealthy landowners. In Madras little could be done until the burden of the Carnatic nawab’s debts was removed and the country was settled after the Cornwallis-Wellesley annexations (1792–99). There, economic settlement turned on the working of the ryotwari revenue system; regularity of collection was offset by severity of assessment, and the same may be said of both western and northern India.

After about1800 there was a new factor: machine-made cotton goods from Britain. These steadily undermined the Indian handicraft industries until all but the highest and coarsest grades of cloth were squeezed out. The district of Dacca (now Dhaka, Bangl.) was especially illustrative of this process. Beginning in 1836, tea was grown in Assam and coffee was cultivated in the south. Coal mining was begun, but its growth, with that of the jute and cotton machine industries, had to wait for the second half of the century. The average Indian was far more secure than before (except for famine) but generally was not much more prosperous. India drifted toward the status of a colonial economy, a supplier of raw materials, a market for manufactured articles, to the profit of the foreigner.

The social effects of this period were considerable. They took mainly the form of the displacement of classes. As already noted, there was a general disturbance in Bengal caused by the permanent settlement, whereby the lesser landholders were reduced to the condition of tenants-at-will. But there was also disturbance among the zamindars. The first upset followed the famine of 1770, when the cultivators were often too few for the revenue demand to be met, and “farming” the revenue—that is, selling the right of taxation to a second party—for some time took the place of a revenue settlement. The second upset came with the permanent settlement of 1793, when the revenue figure fixed was in many cases too high for the existing cultivation. By 1820 it was calculated that more than one-third of the estates had changed hands through sale for arrears of land tax. The purchasers were in the main the Calcutta entrepreneurs newly enriched by their contacts with the British. Many were absentees. The social link between landholder and cultivator had been broken, cash nexus replacing traditional rights.

In Calcutta itself, these same rentiers formed a fashionable and intellectual society from which came the first significant cultural contacts with the West. It was composed of the prosperous section of the three upper Bengali castes, with such others as gained acceptance by their wealth or education. Collectively, this literate class of gentry was known as the bhadralok (“respectable people”).

In the north there was less dislocation, though the landholders, many of whom had no title but the sword, tended to be repressed. There was a general recognition of rights and broadly of their protection. The chief sufferers were ruling families, who lost power, and the official aristocracy, who lost office. In the south, chiefs whom Sir Thomas Munro dispossessed were largely in the class of robber barons.

In western India a balance between aristocratic and cultivating rights was perhaps better-maintained than elsewhere, and relations were more harmonious. Of significance was the rapid development of Bombay from the time it came to possess a large hinterland in 1818. With it came the rise of the enterprising Parsi community (Zoroastrians of Persian heritage).

In general, apart from Bengal, there was some repression of the old aristocracy, a regulation and preservation of lesser landholders’ rights, and an encouragement of the commercial classes. Communities did not break up, but their fortunes rose and fell with their ability to adjust to changing conditions.

Cultural effects

The cultural effects of British influence during the century from 1757 to 1857, though less spectacular, were in the long run farther-reaching. At first there was little enough. But as the Europeans grew in political importance, Indians became interested in the causes of the growth, so that the first examples of cultural influence were in the military field. Some Europeans, in their turn, early interested themselves in Indian culture, as evident from the foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 by Sir William Jones and from the translation of Sanskrit works such as the Bhagavadgita and Kalidasa’s Abhijnanashakuntala and of Persian works such as the Āʾīn-e Akbarī by Abū al-Faḍl ʿAllāmī.

As the British completed their supremacy, four Indian attitudes could be discerned. There were Indians who rejected all things Western, retiring to their houses and estates to dream of the past. There were those who were clients and employees of the British, as they had been of the Mughals and the Turks before them, without any intention of giving up their traditional culture. But there were also those who, while remaining good Hindus or Muslims, began to study Western ways and thought for careerist purposes. And there was, finally, a small group who sought to study the ideas and spirit of the West with a view to incorporating in their own society anything that seemed desirable.

The agents of Western influence were government officials, who carried Western ideas such as utilitarianism and equality before the law and Western concepts of property into their administration of revenue and the law, and missionaries, who combined hostility to Hinduism and Islam with the presentation of a new ethic—the practice of good works and the promotion of English education as preliminaries for conversion. It was at this point that the Indian careerist and inquirer met the new Western stream of thought. The English language was popular because it opened paths to employment and influence; orthodox Hindus patronized the English schools and promoted the Hindu College (now Presidency College) in Calcutta (1816). This college, along with Alexander Duff’s Scottish Church College, also in Calcutta, became a centre of Western influence and saw the rise of the Young Bengal movement, the Westernizing zeal of which denied the Hindu religion itself.

But between the complete Westernizers and the careerists was a third group, which found a leader of genius in Ram Mohun Roy. Making a moderate fortune in Calcutta finance, which he invested in zamindaris, from 1815 Roy advocated reforms in Hindu society and the acceptance of some features of Western thought. He denounced suttee (the burning of widows) and championed the cause of the Indian widow and wife. He advocated English education as a means of bringing Western knowledge to India. He denounced idolatry and preached monotheism. With his Precepts of Jesus, he both introduced the Christian ethic into Hindu society and drew the sting of missionary attacks. He finally founded a reforming Hindu body, the Brahmo Samaj (“Society of Brahma”), in 1828. Both careerists and Roy’s followers cooperated in the spread of English education, but it was the latter who began the movement of borrowing from the West without any feeling of disloyalty to their past.

By the year 1857 the British had established complete political control of the Indian subcontinent, which they ruled directly or through subordinate princes. They had established an authoritarian system of government, making use of Mughal practice and tradition and supported by an efficient civil service and a relatively efficient army. Princely India remained, for the most part, in a stagnant traditionalism. In British India land settlements had produced much social dislocation while purporting to respect traditional rights and to learn from the past; in particular, the Western concept of property in land had led to much social displacement. The Westernized legal system was efficient in suppressing crime but dilatory in upholding rights and incomprehensible for most natives in its working. Social evils like suttee and infanticide and practices such as those of the thugs had been suppressed or discouraged, but Hinduism and Islam were still by and large respected. The revolutionary aspect of the British presence was the decision, taken about the time of the tenure of Lord William Bentinck as governor-general, to introduce Western knowledge and science through the medium of the English language. Western inventions like the telegraph, modern irrigation, railways, and steamships followed, throwing India open to the industrial mechanistic and democratic world of the developing West. Along with education came the Christian missionary intrusion, with its moral and ideological challenge. This, in its turn, provoked a creative response from Ram Mohun Roy’s circle, who were laying the foundations of a modernized Hinduism, which was later to find political expression in the Indian National Congress.